The transmission control protocol (TCP) is a network communication standard at the transport layer of a networking stack. TCP generally provides facilities to reliably (e.g., in order, error checked, with re-transmission, etc.) transport data via an internet protocol (IP) between host devices. TCP generally includes establishing connections between hosts and transferring data over established connections. Thus, TCP may involve greater setup than stateless protocols, such as the user datagram protocol (UDP). In addition to providing facilities for error checking, in-order delivery, and retransmission of data, TCP also includes a number of congestion recognition and mitigation capabilities.
TCP operates at a network layer somewhat higher than the physical (PHY) or media access (MAC) layers. In next generation wireless networks, these PHY and MAC layers are evolving to include more radio bands in a wider range of frequencies than have generally been used in the past. Millimeter wave PHY layers are becoming more common with the next generation wireless networks. Millimeter wave radio band communications for next generation wireless networks may provide significant bandwidth and latency benefits. Often, bands are structured such that downlink (e.g., from the network to a device) channels have more bandwidth than uplink channels, to address likely use cases in which the uplink is used primarily to transmit compact query data or acknowledgments (ACKs) from the device to the network.